As the development of nanoscale mechanical, electrical, chemical and biological devices and systems increases, new processes and materials are needed to fabricate nanoscale devices and components. This is especially true as the scale of these structures decreases into the tens of nanometers. There is a particular need for materials and methods that are able to duplicate nanoscale patterns over large areas with perfect or near-perfect registration of the pattern features. Block copolymer materials are useful in nanofabrication because they self-assemble into distinct domains with dimensions in the tens of nanometers or lower.
In the past nanostructures and functional devices fabricated using block copolymers, including quantum dots, magnetic storage media, flash memory devices, semiconductor capacitors, photonic crystals, and nanopores, have either required or benefited from the highly ordered and periodic nature of the self-assembled material. For many applications in advanced lithography and the semiconductor industry, however, features must be patterned in complex geometries that lack such long-range order.